Hathaway Brown School

Shaker Heights, OH

For
the past two decades, with the steadfast partnership of the E.E. Ford
Foundation, Hathaway Brown School has sought to reinvent the high
school experience so that it is less about the “alphabet
soup” of APs, SATs, and GPAs, and more about preparing young
adults to be visionaries and leaders, problem-solvers and change
agents, poised, in the words of our mission statement, “to
rise boldly to the challenges of their times.”

The
result of our partnership is a whole new architecture for preparation,
Hathaway Brown’s Institute for
21stCentury
Education.

The
Institute is not a building or a wing of
classrooms; it is a new way of thinking about what a school is and how
learning can happen at the most transformative level. It is a structure
that constantly and urgently pushes all of us at HB to be relevant and
engaged. It encompasses a constellation of Centers and
programs, all deeply connected to the core curriculum and all reaching
well beyond the traditional academic disciplines. The Centers are
designed to draw oxygen to the flame of a student’s
flickering passion, engage the major issues of our era, and cultivate
the competencies needed to get big things done in a world that
doesn’t follow the rules of a classroom syllabus.

The
Institute can be visualized as a solar
system, with the core curriculum as the gravitational hub and the
Centers as orbiting planets expanding the boundaries of possibility.
The Institute enables students to focus on
and experiment in such fields of inquiry as scientific research, global
citizenship, service and leadership, environmental studies, and urban
education. Some Centers have full time directors, and nearly all
involve sophisticated collaboration with such institutions as NASA, the
Cleveland Clinic, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Case Western Reserve
University, and the World Educational Alliance. By enabling students to
truly customize their secondary school education, the
Institute democratizes excellence:
the only requirements for participation are intellectual
curiosity and a willingness to expend time and effort. One half of our
$250,000 grant will be used to support three of the newer Centers in
the Institute: The Worldwide
Communications Center; The Center for Girls’ and
Women’s Leadership; and The Center for Environmental
Studies.

The balance of the grant ($125,000) will
be used to create and host an E.E.
FordFoundation Summit for Educational
Innovation where initiatives like the HB Institute would
be showcased, and where teams of educators from independent schools
around the country would gather to exchange transformative ideas and
learn from one another. The Summit on Innovation
would be, to the best of our knowledge, the first
symposium exclusively devoted to the theme of innovation in independent
schools, and its intimate size would enable faculty/administrative
teams to gain easy personal access to transformative practices.
Throughout its existence, the E.E. Ford Foundation has been the
country’s leading “venture capital”
source for original thinking in independent schools. The Summit would
give the Foundation a powerful and rare way to encourage schools to
create a culture of innovation and to spread excellent ideas more
rapidly and economically throughout the independent school
community.